“Time, or notions of time, are always compelling. I read what comes my way about physics and mathematics, but I read as one who’s uninitiated. It’s very difficult to get your mind around these concepts, but it is possible to read about them with fascination. My interest in the essence of time is serious, but my dealing with time is not knowledge-based; it’s more exploratory and feeling-based."
(H.F. 2007)

HREINN FRIÐFINNSSON (b. 1943, Dalir, Iceland) is considered one of Iceland’s leading conceptual artists.
His works mostly consist of mundane and familiar everyday objects and materials. In rearranging, combining or transforming these seemingly insignificant materials, Friðfinnsson identifies and activates the poetic dimensions within them. Through minimal interventions he reveals the conceptual potential of the already existing.

Friðfinnsson’s art is rooted in his memories and experiences of his homeland, often times echoing aspects of its nature and its lyricism, its legends, rumors, secrets, and dreams. The use of narrative and story-telling is combined with a stark, minimalistic and unobtrusive visual language. Friðfinnsson works within a wide range of media such as photography and text, drawing, painting, and since a few years, installation and film. All works seem to be linked by a common sensibility which leads us to contemplate on the possibility of discovering something extraordinary within each work – it is precisely this durational approach to looking, thinking and experiencing with which Friðfinnsson is engaged. Time seems to be standing still for just one moment…

Time can be considered one of the central themes within Friðfinnsson's practice. It seems that his individual approach to, or rather understanding of time is the starting point for many of his undertakings. The artist reflects subjective and intuitive notions of time within the context of physics and astronomy and is not afraid to touch upon essential questions of life. Hreinn Friðfinnsson experiments with the possibility of parallel constructs of time and intersections between them. In his art works he visualizes time leaps and accelerates or decelerates temporal processes, thus questioning the concept of linearity.

Friðfinnsson’s works often appear as excerpts from an overarching story-line or as little episodes of everyday-life. In addition, they are characterized by a fascinating serenity and intriguing calmness which makes them stand out of the flood of images that we are used to today.

In a separate room, Safn Berlin presents works by Swiss artist ROMAN SIGNER (b. 1938, Appenzell, Switzerland). Time, as in process, change, and transformation, is an essential part of Signer’s art works and his unique approach to sculpture:

“I prefer to use the term ‘events’ to characterize my work. Something has happened, and is now simply there, as evidence – evidence of a force that exerted itself in the space. Always in my work something is going to happen, is happening or has happened. Or could happen.”
(R.S. 2006)

Galerie Tanja Wagner is pleased to present new works by Kapwani Kiwanga. A Memory Palace is her first solo exhibition in Germany.

Kapwani Kiwanga's projects often manifest as video and sound installations as well as peformances. She intentionally confuses truth and fiction in order to unsettle hegemonic narratives and create spaces in which marginal discourse can flourish.

In this exhibition Kiwanga offers the visitor a journey through time, constructed spaces, and assembled narratives using image and sound. As the title suggests, the concept of the palace or grand residency is central in the exhibition. The artist references a now-disappeared physical edifice; the former Reich Chancellery of Berlin which was known also as Palais Radziwill or Palais Schulenburg. This building was the setting to a number of historic events and important meetings.

The starting point for the exhibition is the Congo conference, 1884-1885, a series of diplomatic meetings which transpired within this building’s walls. European and American representatives met at the palace and made decisions which would change the geopolitical topography forever. The orders made regulated European trade in Africa, lead to the establishment of the Congo Free State, and set the stage for the ensuing “scramble for Africa”; the fervent colonisation of Africa by European nations. Kiwanga’s investigations take her around, beside, beyond, and before the Congo conference to unearth some intriguing stories. Stories she is eager to relate.

For the opening, the artist will perform a conference-performance based on her research on the Congo Conference which pulls together creation myths, liberatory acts, detective novels and crimes against humanity. Some of these performative elements will find their way into the exhibition where Kiwanga transforms the gallery into a physical manifestation of a memory palace. A memory palace is an ancient Greek method of memory enhancement, which uses visualization to organize and recall information. Items of information to be remembered are mentally associated with specific physical locations within a larger encompassing imagined space. When one needs to retrieve these items one only needs to imagine one’s self on a journeying through this space. Arriving at different imagined locations, images or situations unfold which trigger one to remember associated information.

Kiwanga employs both image and spoken word in her construction into a three dimensional memory palace. The visitor is invited to discover signs which range from obscure to iconic, archival to popular. The images all work together in a quest to hear new stories. As such, in A Memory Palace, Kiwanga offers the visitor a conceptual, temporal, and geographical meander without a definite telos if not to inscribe some facts and fictions into one’s memory.

Kapwani Kiwanga studied Anthropology and Comparative Religions at McGill University, Montréal. She was an artist in residence at: L’Ecole National Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris; Le Fresnoy: National Contemporary Art Studio (France), MU Foundation, Eindhoven and Le Manège, Dakar.
Her film and video works have been nominated for two Awards of the British Academy of Film and Television, and have received awards at international film festivals. She has exhibited internationally including at Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, Foundation Ricard, Paris, France; Glasgow Centre of Contemporary Art, Paris Photo, Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo, Almería, Spain; and the Art Catalyst, London. Recent and upcoming exhibitions include Jeu de Paume, Paris; Berlin Ethnographic Museum, The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris; Hebbel Am Ufer, Berlin, SALT, Istanbul, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

'It’s not lame...it’s Lamé' is the first solo exhibition in Berlin by artist Jimmy Robert. Born in Guadeloupe, Robert was raised and educated in Europe in the 1990s – an era in which questions of citizenship and representation were hotly contested. Rather than creating conspicuously political artworks, Robert takes his cues from cultural figures of the recent past-avant-garde writers, filmmakers, visual artists – who were not only pioneers in their respective art forms but also deft at subtly registering the traumas and effects of their social conditions. Robert’s concern for the body – both personal and political – in addition to his interest in the poetic potential of ephemeral materials unites much of his work, which ranges in media from photography, film, and video to sculpture and collaborative performance.

Robert typically uses photographic portraiture as a starting point for his works on paper, gently breaking down divisions between two and three dimensions, image and object. In some cases Robert uses found photographs that he tears, collages, tapes, and crumples before digitally scanning them and pinning them to the wall. In other cases, Robert takes new photographs in his studio and crams them into wooden boxes or arranges them on the gallery floor. Extending into the space of the gallery, these works create a relationship to the viewer’s body while underscoring a sense of impermanence. Likewise, Robert’s sculptures are either made from wood-based materials or give the illusion of paper forms and often play with notions of value and durability.

Integrated within his photographic and sculpture practice, performance remains an integral part of Robert’s work. The installation Reprise, for example, demonstrates how objects can also be performative. The work references Canadian artist Jeff Wall’s photograph A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993, which captures five figures physically responding to a strong wind. The composition in Wall’s work is a recreation of Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai’s (1760-1849) woodcut Ejiri in Suruga Province (Sunshū Ejiri), 1830-33. The theatricality in the movement of the figures in both works acts as a point of departure for Robert’s Reprise. His dance and performance works value gesture and chance over elaborate choreography, referring to Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono and Yvonne Rainer of the Judson Dance Theater. To recreate Metallica for this exhibition, Robert has collaborated with a dancer trained in the Forsythe technique; the live performance will occur three times during the course of the preview at 7pm, 8pm, and 9pm.

For more information and images please contact info@tanyaleighton.com or telephone +49(0)30221607770. The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-6pm and by appointment.

Tanya Leighton is pleased to announce a solo exhibition by the American artist Wyatt Kahn, his first in Germany. Kahn’s exhibition comprises two drawings and three paintings, continuing the artist’s investigation into materiality, painterly form, along with methods of working on paper. Kahn’s paintings are assemblages of cut and shaped MDF panels, which have been covered with twice stretched fabric. The artist joins these forms, employing the gaps between panels as compositional elements in a visual space that incorporates both the painting itself and the wall on which the canvas is hung. The works on view mark a development in Kahn’s practice: his hand-drawn patterned fabrics now incorporate two sets of motifs, which, when paired with the composition of each painting, create a surprising juxtaposition of objects and sounds.

All of the works in the exhibition derive their imagery from linguistic pairings, or duets – two distinct objects which both make the same sound. In the painting Sunny Side Up, a frying pan and the sun are pictured, the imagery representing both alludes to an onomatopoeic parallel: both things ‘sizzle’. The two drawings on view are paired as another duet, both evoking the sound ‘buzz’. Kahn outlines the objects and forms of his drawings using a thick waxed graphite pencil, which leaves a raised line on the surface of the paper that recalls the recessed seams of the works on canvas. Similar patterned motifs fill the spaces delineated by the artist’s marks, veiled under a thin sheet of fiber paper.

Wyatt Kahn (b. 1983, New York) lives and works in New York. He has presented solo shows at LA><ART, Los Angeles; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich; and T293, Rome. He has been featured in group exhibitions internationally, including Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York; Bortolami Gallery, New York; Dallas Museum of Art; and as part of ReMap 4 in Athens, among others. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago in 2006 and his MFA from Hunter College in New York in 2012. In 2015, he will have a show at the Contemporary Art Museum, Saint Louis and a project at the Performa Biennial. His solo show at Tanya Leighton is organized in collaboration with Adrian Rosenfeld, Los Angeles.

For more information and images please contact info@tanyaleighton.com or telephone +49(0)30221607770. The gallery is open Tuesday - Saturday, 11am-6pm and by appointment.

taubert contemporary is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in Germany by Sylvan Lionni.

For his own work, Sylvan Lionni regards abstraction as an impossible solution since, as he claims, no rational decision on each possible variation is available to him. The overall superiority of painting plays a crucial role to him. At the same time, it is nowadays characterised by its technical freedom, since dripping, scraping and printing techniques need not be explained, and the painting has long since been freed from its rectangular stretcher frame. His apparent solution is representational painting. In some of the paintings, the object can almost be seen as a ready-made. In other works, the model remains hidden by the choice of the selected section. His supposedly rational way is by no means objective. The alienation alone, through the redemption of the object, is deeply subjective. Lionni’s always technically precisely converted images might be interpreted in the tradition of pop art as the staging of consumer culture or because of their minimalist appearance as a conscious quote from recent art history. Perhaps this is all true, but the result of the labour is also completely free, because he succeeds in finding an abstract detachment. Thus, his paintings morph into meditative tableaux. Lionni the painter carves out the important questions of concrete or abstract. But the viewer receives no answer – only a mere guidance for reflection.

The exhibition shows works from the current series of the Ruler Paintings, the Dust Paintings and the Cake Boxes.The Ruler Paintings are particularly representative examples of Lionni’s entire previous oeuvre. This is not a continuation of a simple geometrical abstraction. Rather, Silvan Lionni deliberately quotes the history of art and uses supposed objets trouvés in the composition of the image.
The Dust Paintings show touches of fingers or hands, evidence such as streaks or scratches. Lionni’s basic motivation behind this can be described as a conceptually planned form of abstract expressionism. Some of the Cake Boxes are called Totem, highlighting what they are about for the artist. The title stands for the symbol in the sense of a mundane metaphor or a sacred symbol. And the models for this group of works are indeed mundane, yet the eye is guided over the monochrome colour through edges and cuts. Shadows lend variation to the surface. The desire for haptic experience replaces the metaphor.

Ascan Iredi, March 2015.

Sylvan Lionni, born in 1973 in Chuckfield, United Kingdom.
He lives and works in Eugene, Oregon, USA.

A catalogue will be published on the occasion of the exhibition. (ISBN 978-3-00-048963-1).

In Friedemann Heckel’s hands drawing is addressed, both as a covering or surface that can be detached from its source and reinserted elsewhere, and as a subversive language whose abstract signs are both meaningful and mysterious. As with much of Heckel's work, this has its origins in his careful observations of the urban environment. His latest works question the relationship between the visual and haptic qualities of goods and images, and the political economy through which they circulate; and which is, in Heckel's works, quite literally inscribed on its surfaces.

VW (VeneKlasen/Werner) is pleased to present Visionary Transformation, an exhibition of new works by Zheng Guogu. This is the artist's first solo exhibition in Berlin and features sculptures, paintings, photographs and the 20 minute film Mind Acts Without Attachments, all created between 2011 - 2015.

Zheng Guogu is one of China's most versatile contemporary artists, recognized more by his thematic approach rather than any particular medium. His practice reflects the contemporary world's connection with today's media but also utilizes an intimate knowledge of traditional Chinese, Buddhist and Daoist art.

This exhibition features works from different series which are bound together by a narrative trait. Computer Controlled by Pig's Brain alludes to the impact of commercial mass media and the fictive nature of images. The history of Chinese painting is dissected and its methodology reflects Guogu´s questioning approach to established associations and symbols. The Brain Nerves are not only abstract portraits of the mental space of artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Joseph Beuys, but also measure the sensibility of the brains of the portrayed subjects. The works of the Visionary Transformation series are reminiscent of Buddhist Thangka paintings, yet Guogu aims to distill the essence of the iconographic subject and to transform the material energy of the painting into a mirror that opens up a personal search for truth. The aesthetic resonance of Chakra series is based on the artist´s exploration of the seven chakras. These series of paintings share the will to resonate the energy between the space of the painting and the energy centers within the viewer.

In 2000 Zheng Guogu created The Age Of Empire, now called Liao Garden, as his independent living and working space, facilitating a multi-disciplinary practice that is open to critical observations. The film Mind Acts Without Attachments, presented in the gallery´s cinema, partly documents the life and artistic community generated by this project, allowing the audience to conceptually experience the group's artistic practice as well as witness hints of questioning the status quo of society while blurring the line between fiction and reality.

The opening of the exhibition will be celebrated with an ancient Chinese tea and agarwood incense ceremony, conducted by the artist.

Zheng Guogu was born in 1970 in Yangjiang, Guangdong Province, China, where he also lives and works today. He graduated from the Printmaking Department at Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts in 1992. Guogu has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout China, North America and Europe and was the subject of solo exhibitions at Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (in cooperation with Yangjiang Group) (2013) and at BizArt Art Center, Shanghai (2006). His work was included in the Zone of Urgency at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003), the documenta 12 (2007), the Shanghai Biennale (2002) and (2014). Guogu is the recipient of the 2006 Best Artist Award of the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA).

Zheng Guogu: Visionary Transformation opens with a reception for the artist on Saturday,
21 March from 18:00 to 21:00 and is on view through 25 April 2015. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 11AM to 6PM. For more information please call the gallery at
+49 30 8161 60418, write to info@vwberlin.com or visit vwberlin.com.

“Eckart Hahn is an uncanny perfect painter, who entirely in accordance with traditions has a complete mastery of his handwork. The central-perspective illusionism in his pictures can hardly prevent us from recognizing his art as being a product of visual inventions from the deepest interior of his spirit. The collage-like combination of spaces and objects and the processes which at first glance appear to evade all rational understanding, which appear in these pictures, belong to expression of this uncanniness.”
(Bernd Künzig, in: Einsichten, Catalogue of Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt, 2007)

01 April 2015 — 30 April 2015
Spani­sche Malerei [Spanish Pain­ting] is a pain­terly portrait of Spain’s reality rendered geome­tri­cally. In this new series, PSJM deve­lops a line of “social geometry” using statistics to deter­mine a variety of geome­tric compo­si­tions. PSJM creates these pieces by strictly adhe­ring to pain­ting mate­rials. In a more or less explicit manner, a reflec­tion on pain­ting has permeated the team’s trajectory.
Spani­sche Malerei is their crea­tive output from 2013, a year immersed in the most severe finan­cial crisis people have been forced to expe­ri­ence. Demands for auste­rity somehow make them­selves felt in the produc­tion process, now removed from resple­ndent indus­trial surfaces. Thus, the hard times faced by the cultural sector are seen in a direct and honest way. Just like the poli­tical, finan­cial and social reality which shall be brought to the fore in these mathe­ma­tical reflec­tions rendered in acrylic on canvas.
Notwith­stan­ding the hand­crafted nature of these pain­tings, the preci­sion and neat­ness of their finish reminds us of the implacable hand of the machine. The indus­trial primary colours are dras­ti­cally applied follo­wing radical compo­si­tions that take the figure of the acurate triangle as a prevai­ling motif. Removed from any deco­ra­tive pretence, these “pain­tings which can be read” suggest a harsh reality that has been objec­tivised through the flow of imper­sonal infor­ma­tion. Data and colours that conceal personal dramas, hege­monic ideo­lo­gical trends and social unrest.

In regard to the occurrence of visual anthropology and other civilisational histories, the enigmatic work and personality of Jose Maria Sert comes into view as particularly inventive and eccentric.

One of the very early artists to practice a cosmopolitan ethos at the beginning of the 20th century, Jose Maria Sert, born 1874 in Barcelona, moved to Paris as early as 1899, married the Russian “collector of geniuses” and pianist Misia Godebska a.k.a. Misia Sert, and was commissioned for monumental works in New York (Rockefeller Center), Geneva (Palais des Nations), Vic (Cathedral), Paris (Ballet Russes), London, Buenos Aires, Venice, Madrid, Palm Beach etc… His anachronic oeuvres of majestic architectural paintings question notions of contemporaneity and historicity, art and decorative arts at the birth of Modernism. This shifting allegiance to the past and the present is particularly visible in his preparatory works. While dismissing photography as exclusively pragmatic, Sert is nevertheless a pioneer in this medium with the elaboration of human compositions of children, athletes and acrobats petrified in impossible choreography, which through the technique of “mise au carreau” were used as preparatory studies for his delirious paintings.

This exhibition insists on the objectification of the body, particularly the male body, often black - replacing the discretionary white female subject - anticipating post-structuralist theories of representation. This depersonalisation of the body is further accentuated with the parallel use of “santons”, wire, textile and earth ware nativity figures, and wood mannequins.

This extraordinary collection of vintage argentic prints with artist’s annotations constitutes a unique immersion in studio practice and performative process.

This the second exhibition of Jose Maria Sert in Germany after the one presented at the Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin in 1997. Recent exhibitions include the Petit Palais, Paris in 2013 and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge to travel to the Musée Bourdelle, Paris, both in 2015.

The gallery is open from Wednesday to Saturday, from 2 to 6 pm during the length of the exhibition.

ŻAK | BRANICKA gallery is pleased to present Immeasurables, the second solo exhibition by Vlatka Horvat.

Investigating the politics and poetics of spatial arrangement, order and organization, interpersonal and social relations, Vlatka Horvat’s practice explores the characteristics of interaction between the body, the built environment and the objects that inhabit it. In her collages, photographs and installations, Horvat often places the body in awkward, puzzling and uncanny positions, situating it on the horizon of objecthood – a move which questions the stability of categories and structures through which social and political meaning is made. Whilst the body in Horvat’s work is repeatedly depicted as disjointed and discombobulated, situated between functional and dysfunctional, between subject and object, the space in which it performs its often absurdist and Dadaist operations, is itself ‘out of joint’.
Horvat approaches built space and time as series of elements, which can be re-arranged and reconstituted, as though the true nature of both might only become intelligible through the process of unraveling them. In these procedures, – which include cutting and severing objects, merging them with other dismantled objects, or intervening in built spaces by emulating elements of architecture using cheap disposable materials such as sponge, cardboard and rubber bands –, the space, the objects and bodies it contains, all converge into a puzzling and uncanny field of new special and temporal becomings.

At the centre of the gallery’s main space, Horvat presents a selection of new wall-based collage works The Past is Another Country in which the artist reaches for what lies beneath the surface of her family photographs from the 1960s and 1970s, made in Socialist Yugoslavia, at the time when the idea of solidarity, belief in the future and progress were still at their pinnacle. Horvat’s mode of ‘entering’ these images–all featuring her mother as young adult–through a set of sophisticated, formal gestures, suggests an almost infantile attempt of evicting the intergenerational transfer of the sense of loss and disillusionment. Using a series of cutting and folding gestures, the artist sometimes removes all context and surroundings around the figure, leaving it suspended in the midst of empty frames. At other times Horvat folds the figure outside the edges of the photograph, or outside the edges of the paper itself.
The relation between the sides and the middle similarly comes to the fore in the sculptural work Peripheral Awareness, in which a range of round or tubular objects are placed at the very edges of a table, precariously stopped at the table’s brink, apparently caught at a precipice. The safety of the middle and the stability of the centre are abandoned here for a more precarious space of the edge, and the possibility of the objects “going over the edge” (in both literal and metaphorical sense) hangs in the air. As is the case with Horvat’s collages, in Peripheral Awareness, the safe center also becomes a site of abandonment–evacuated and deserted –while the edges become sites of activity, enlivened with the presence of objects/figures occupying it, but which are displaced and stopped in a precarious balance between stability and the potential fall.

The walls around the sculptural works hold Spread Pages, Horvat’s delicate reworkings of the surface of A4 paper. Here the artist again applies a formally consistent process of cutting and folding their surfaces, expanding them outwards from their one-time boundaries to create a constellation of Moebius-like geometrical conundrums. In this process, basic blank pages are dismantled as solid flat-plane surfaces to become problematic three-dimensional artifacts whose borders, edges, and interior dimensions are constantly an issue. While much of Horvat’s work to date has subjected a human figure to gestures such as cutting and severing, recombining and reconfiguring, here the focus shifts to the reconfiguration of an object, to negotiation and distribution of space itself, to the possibilities of occupying it, and of re-drawings its borders. In the spatial redefinition and literal unpacking of this everyday object–the page–and in the repeated flux/reversal of outside and inside, Spread Pages evokes the social and political movements of territorial expansion and conquest, and the psychological processes of interior revelation and exploration.